Marriage and social class

Russell Shaw

11/01/17

Among the benign myths that lie close to the hearts of many
Americans is the belief that, in the end, social class differences don’t count
for all that much. It’s the Horatio Alger story: hard work and perseverance
will pay off for anyone who wants to get his or her slice of the American
Dream.

Would that it were so, but the evidence says it isn’t. Consider
marriage and the family. When it comes to sharing in the advantages associated
with marriage and two-parent family life, Americans are increasingly divided
along the lines of social class.

Consider this from a new study:

“College-educated and more affluent Americans enjoy relatively
strong and stable marriages and the economic and social benefits that flow from
such marriages. By contrast, not just poor but also working-class Americans
face rising rates of family instability, single parenthood and life-long
singleness.”

The study, titled “The Marriage Divide,” is the work of
sociologists W. Bradford Wilcox of the University of Virginia and Wendy Wang of
the Institute for Family Studies, and was published jointly as a “research
brief” by several Washington think tanks. Its thrust is summed up in its
subtitle: “How and Why Working-Class Families Are More Fragile Today.”

Note that word “more.” The point is that things have been getting
worse. Half a century ago, Wilcox and Wang say, there was no significant
difference in marriage and family matters between affluent and working-class
Americans. The “vast majority” in both groups “got and stayed married, and most
children lived in stable, two-parent families.”

But since the 1960s, the authors report, the United States has
witnessed “an emerging substantial marriage divide by class.”

The present situation is reflected in numbers showing that the
percentage of now-married adults ages 18-55 is 56 percent among middle- and
upper-class Americans, 39 percent among the working class, and 26 percent among
the poor. The figures for cohabitation are 5 percent among the middle and upper
classes, 10 percent among the working class and 13 percent among the poor.

To a great extent, the process that produced these numbers over
the last 50 years was spurred by economic factors linked to the changeover from
an industrial to a post-industrial economy, which made it harder for many poor
and working-class men to find “stable, decent-paying” jobs. As one might
expect, the problem was exacerbated by the Great Recession.

But Wilcox and Wang insist that economic factors aren’t the whole
explanation. On the contrary, what has happened has a lot to do with changes in
social attitudes that favor sexual permissiveness, individualism, a decline of
family values and a general fraying of what they call the “civic fabric”
including a decline in membership in churches and other community groups.
(“Americans who regularly attend religious service are more likely to marry,
have children in wedlock, avoid divorce and enjoy higher-quality relationships.”)

Against this background, the authors conclude that the nation’s
leaders should act energetically to promote family values — still relatively
strong among the middle and upper classes — among working class and poor
Americans. Unfortunately, they don’t say what those steps might be, although
simply refraining from further encroachments on religious liberty to enforce
secularist views comes readily to mind.

The alternative, they write, is “a world where middle- and
upper-class Americans benefit from strong, stable families while everyone else
faces increasingly fragile families, and where high rates of economic
inequality and child poverty are locked in by a marriage divide that puts
working-class and poor Americans — and their children — at a stark
disadvantage.”

Shaw is a freelance writer from Washington and author of American Church: The
Remarkable Rise, Meteoric Fall, and Uncertain Future of Catholicism in America.